Dissidence cannot be suppressed; it can, however, be concealed, and anxious Cuban authorities have repeatedly shown their determination to block foreign awareness of disaffected intellectuals.

Armando Valladares, a poet and painter, has been imprisoned for the last 19 years. One of the "plantados"–those who refuse to participate in "rehabilitation programs"–he has been an invalid since 1974 as a result of mistreatment by prison authorities. In 1979 a collection of his poetry entitled "From My Wheelchair" appeared in French translation. As a reprisal, Mr. Valladares was denied medical care, and his relatives, who had complied with all the requirements for emigration to the United States, were barred from leaving the island. On July 10 of this year Mr. Valladares sent a letter to the PEN American Center explaining: "A high official of the Political Police has notified me that my family's departure from the country is in my hands; that if I draft a letter denying my friends among intellectuals and poets living abroad, if I forbid them and everyone else–newspapers and organizations included–to speak or write about me and my literary works, even to mention my name, if I disavow and deny every truth they have spoken on my behalf, then my family can leave. To write that letter would be to commit spiritual suicide. I will never write it!"

Ernesto Diaz Rodriguez smuggled out of prison a number of poems that were published in the United States in 1977 with the title "An Urgent Testimony" ("Un testimonio urgente"). In a letter sent through the underground he recounts how, in response, in April 1978 he was taken from his cell to the Department of Political Police, kept isolated there for a month, repeatedly questioned about his writing and, finally warned: "'Your persistence in developing a dissident cultural movement, particularly abroad, is intolerable, and we will try to prevent it by all the means we have.'"

The young poet Miguel Sales was given a 25-year sentence in 1974 after he was found preparing to flee Cuba with his wife and infant daughter. "From Behind Bars" ("Desde las rejas"), a volume of his verse, was published in the United States in 1976 and brought his plight to the attention of human-rights organizations, which exerted pressure on the Castro Government to secure Sales' freedom. In 1978 he was allowed to come to the United States and has since spoken on Cuban dissident literature at Harvard, Georgetown and the University of California at Los Angeles, as well as in London and Paris. Mr. Sales recalls that as a prisoner he learned of the fortunes of his poetry abroad through the punishment it brought him, through the harassment of his wife and searches of his home.

Another poet, Angel Cuadra, was legal adviser to the Cuban Institute of Musicians, Actors and Writers at the time of his arrest in 1967 after he unsuccessfully sought permission to emigrate. Charged with acts "against the security of the State," he served two-thirds of a 15-year sentence and was paroled in 1976. Then "Impromptus," an anthology of his elegiac, apolitical poems, was published in the United States, and in consequence his parole was revoked. In May of this year he wrote to a friend, the exiled poet Juana Rosa Pita, that "there was no legal basis for this new reprisal against me. Only that I am a poet; that the world speaks my name; that I do not renounce my song, I do not put it on bended knees, nor do I use it for other, political or partisan ends, but only literary, universal, timeless ones." Back in prison, Mr. Cuadra submitted to the "rehabilitation program" and was to be released last July. However, when it was discovered that he had managed to smuggle out a new manuscript–"A Correspondence of Poems" (soon to be published in English translation by Donald D. Walsh)–instead of being released, he was transferred to Boniato Prison, the harshest one in Cuba. Another parolee, Tomás Fernández Travieso, lost his freedom after his play "Prometeo" ("Prometheus") was produced in Miami in 1976.

Amaro Gómez, a member of the Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Arts and Industry, was fired from his job after being accused of "ideological deviation" and was thereafter unable to work except as a bricklayer and a waiter. When a police search of his home turned up some of Mr. Gomez's own writings and a copy of Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn's "Gulag Archipelago," he was tried and sentenced to an eight-year term in prison. Similarly, René Ariza, winner in 1967 of a Cuban Writers' Union Award, was given an eight-year term for defaming the revolution after manuscripts of poetry, a play and a novel were seized in his home.

Raúl Arteaga Martínez, a founder of the Association of Free Poets and Writers of Cuba, a clandestine organization that circulates samizdat in and outside prisons in Cuba, was to be released after completing his 11-year sentence. But when guards found unorthodox poetry in his cell, he was tried without a hearing and received an additional sentence for subversive activity in February 1979.

Reynaldo Arenas is the author of "El mundo alucinante" ("Hallucinations"), a best seller in Europe not long ago. The novel, published in Mexico in 1969, is a fantastic re-creation of the memoirs of a historical figure and contains passages that some critics have interpreted as veiled parodies of the mannerisms and speeches of Fidel Castro. In 1975 Mr. Arenas's home was searched and some of his manuscripts confiscated. He was sentenced to a year in prison on trumped-up charges leveled against him for his defiance of cultural discipline. His writings are not published in Cuba, and he can only find employment as a clerk.

The case of Heberto Padilla–his arrest and forced confession–was a cause célèbre in 1971. Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Alberto Moravia, Susan Sontag, Octavio Paz, Mario Vargas Llosa, to name but a few, decried the punishment and public humiliation of the internationally esteemed poet. Since then, although he has been permitted to work as a translator–like Pasternak in his disgrace–Mr. Padilla's creative writing is a dead letter in Cuba. For the last year, he has been seeking authorization to emigrate, to join his ailing mother and his wife, the poet Belkis Cuza Malé, who fell from grace at the same time as her husband because of her critical views of the Revolution. Notwithstanding support from foreign dignitaries and intellectuals sympathetic to the Castro regime, Mr. Padilla's efforts have been in vain.

Other dissidents have taken steps more drastic than Mr. Padilla's to leave the island. Roberto Ponciano was a member of the Journalists' Union whose articles appeared in the journals Bohemia, Juventud Rebelde ("Rebel Youth") and Cuba Internacional. His poetry met with the disapproval of censors, who repeatedly advised him to adopt a more militant, pro-Government tone. Having been labeled a "problematical writer" by the time he was 28, in 1975, he fled the island in a homemade raft, taking his manuscripts with him. Apprehended on the high seas, he was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment–three for his unsuccessful escape; four for his confiscated literary work.

Also despairing of Government permission to emigrate, the young black writers Esteban Luis Cárdenas Junquera and Reinaldo Colás Pineda sought asylum in the Argentine Embassy in Havana on March 21, 1978. Mr. Colas Pineda had been awarded prizes for his verses in 1975. Mr. Cárdenas Junquera had been expelled from the university in 1966 for anti-Soviet attitudes and later sent to a psychiatric hospital for refusing to serve in the army. Subsequently he became an employee of the National Library, but in 1977 he was twice arrested for "ideological deviation." Both writers were convicted for their unsuccessful attempt to flee the country, but Mr. Cárdenas Junquera, who had manuscripts of his works with him when they were arrested, received more than double the seven-year sentence given Mr. Colás Pineda.

The internationally acclaimed novelist and poet José Lezama Lima, the author of "Paradiso," was forbidden even to travel abroad between 1971 and 1976, the year of his death. One of the eight important writers accused in Mr. Padilla's forced confession of being disaffected or counterrevolutionary, he lived thereafter, as he wrote to his sister, "in terror and in the most devastating melancholy." In 1973 he was refused permission to attend a cultural congress in Mexico. The following year he was invited to Italy, to Colombia, for the Fourth Congress of Latin American Novelists, and to Madrid, to lecture at the Ateneo, the time-honored center of Hispanic intellectual life. Each time he was denied permission to go. The year before his death he received still another invitation for a foreign appearance, this one from the University of Madrid. Again his request was refused. Mr. Lezama Lima's letters, posthumously published in Spain, reveal his bitterness: "I remain immobilized, albeit angry, because last year and this one I have received some six invitations to travel...and always with the same result. I have to stay at home. I am bored and tired." No matter how loudly the Cuban Government may now proclaim Mr. Lezama Lima a glory of the Revolution, the evidence shows that he became its victim.

A good part of Cuban literature–some the work of seasoned writers, still more that of the youth who should be preparing to take their place–is hidden away on the island by the authors themselves or by their trusted colleagues or is in the hands of relatives and friends abroad, many of whom are reluctant to publish it lest the writers, who remain behind, suffer the consequences. Those familiar with Cuban literature of the past 20 years cannot help but notice that accomplished poets, narrators and playwrights of the 1960's have fallen silent or been given limited exposure by the state-run publishing industry. To mention their names would only make their lives more difficult; it would jeopardize their Government-controlled jobs and possibly lead to more serious measures against them. Cuban penal legislation prescribes sentences of up to eight years for those who "create, distribute or possess" written or oral "propaganda" "against the socialist State." The chilling effect of this statute is merely aggravated by the discretion given the censors upon whose opinion application of the law can turn. One of these, Roberto Fernández Retamar, a poet and the editor of the journal Casa de las Américas, recently posed himself the following rhetorical question in an interview: "Who decides whether a work is attacking the Revolution?" He replied, "We do. When I read something that has been submitted to the magazine, I can detect it. The Revolution is not an entelechy. Like it or not, we the revolutionaries are the Revolution."